Monthly Archives: November 2011

A chat with my downstairs neighbor

aliyah, parenting

At about 9:45 on Shabbos morning, my ds5 went out of the building to do an errand for me, and when he returned a few minutes later, he was very upset.  He said (and my daughters confirmed since they could hear from all the way up here) that the downstairs neighbor yelled at him – in English – to stop running around and making noise in our apartment.

When he told me this, I didn’t say a word.  On Shabbos mornings, I like to sleep in late, but because I have young children, I don’t actually sleep.  What I do is stay in bed, and since I don’t want them running around unsupervised, they join me and we read and play together there.  From the time they woke up at 7 am until 9 or 9:30, this is where they were, and it wasn’t until then that I allowed them to run around and play with each other (in their bare feet, because shoes would make more noise).  I’ve tried to accomodate this neighbor and reduce our noise in a number of ways, but once my child was verbally accosted, a line had been crossed that was unacceptable to me.

So I got up, got dressed, and still without saying a word, left our home.  But my desire to be prudent prevailed and I decided to get advice from a neighbor who was here for many years before speaking to the difficult neighbor.  I then learned that this neighbor has told others that they’re hoping to make us so miserable that we’ll move away, and also complained that it’s not bad enough that we have children, but that we even have guests over (the person who was told this was shocked they weren’t embarrassed to say these things out loud).  After speaking to her, my initial anger was over, but my desire to take care of this issue wasn’t.

I’ve said before regarding discussions about homeschooling that I won’t have conversations in which I’m put on the defensive, and that means sometimes turning things around and putting others on the defense instead.  There’s probably a martial arts term for this.  🙂  And this is what I felt needed to be done now, because he was viewing our niceness and efforts to be accommodating as weakness and I was certain he would continue to escalate unless we showed him we wouldn’t tolerate any more.

So I went to his apartment, and pounded on his door as hard as I could.  This was to let him know someone who was very serious about something was going to be on the other side.  As soon as he opened it, he started yelling at me for banging on his door, but he didn’t have much of a chance to talk, since I started yelling over him: “How dare you yell at my son!  If you have a problem, you come to me.  Don’t start up with my children, and don’t start up with me!”

He told me how loud my eleven children are, starting from 5 am in the morning, and I shouted at him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that we don’t have eleven children, they certainly don’t wake up at 5 am, and most of my children are older and aren’t making noise that would disturb him at all – so he’s clearly saying things that don’t make any sense.

He got a little embarrassed here, and said, well, how many children do you have?  I told him it’s irrelevant, and his complaints about us are ridiculous, and even the police he sent to our house could see it was absurd.  He told me how  we should go buy a private house and live there, that we could have bought a house for the price we paid for our apartment (as if!), and I told him I’d be happy to buy a house and move there as soon as he gave us two million shekels to do so.  And until then we’re staying put and have no plans to go anywhere.  I told him if he doesn’t like living in a building with other people, then he can sell his apartment and buy himself a house if he thinks that’s so simple, but otherwise he’s going to have to accept things as they are.

Then he told me if our kids want to play, they can play outside at a public park, not in the house.  I told him our children are entitled to play in their own home, and they’ll continue to do so.  I said I was sure when his son was young that he didn’t forbid him from doing anything but walking quietly across a room.

As we continued to talk, he started to back down, and told me that he didn’t really yell at my son, and when I said he did, he said that he doesn’t feel well and so he sometimes he gets upset.  I told him I don’t care how upset he is, maybe he needs to take aspirin or vitamins but there’s no excuse to yell at a little child not even doing anything wrong.  So he  apologized for yelling at him.

As the conversation continued, he became more reasonable, and then it was finally possible to talk to him.  He told me someone in the past replaced the tiles on the floor of my apartment, and didn’t put in any sound proofing.  I told him I understood why that would be a problem, but this was the first I was hearing of it, and I couldn’t afford to retile the majority of our living space to change this.  But at the end of the conversation, I said that if he was willing to pay for half of the cost, I would pay the other half.  He told me it was my apartment and he wasn’t going to pay a penny, so I shrugged and said it didn’t make a difference to me, that I don’t have extra money to throw around and would rather not have to spend any money on this, but was making the offer as a concrete indication of our willingness to find a solution.

He told me to try to be more understanding, and I told him that I couldn’t be any more understanding than I had already been, and that there was nothing more I could do.  I wanted to be sure when we finished the conversation that he was clear about this.  So we parted, not exactly amiably, but at least I had a good feeling that some things had been straightened out.

A friend, learning about this later in the day, said she couldn’t imagine me yelling at someone.  The things we do for our kids.  😛  Really, a big part of why I felt this had to be done so my kids would know that I wouldn’t let people hurt them if it were in my power.

Although I was yelling and looked and sounded upset, I was watching myself the entire time, almost from a distance.  I felt almost like I was in a play, and was doing a good job playing my part convincingly.  When I first left my home, I was planning to speak to him in English and let him puzzle out what I was saying, because when I feel pressured, I tend to forget some Hebrew vocabulary, and I didn’t want to be at a language disadvantage.  But since I wasn’t angry by the time I spoke to him, it was no problem to yell at him in Hebrew.  🙂

I’m not naive enough to think this will end the situation with him – he has a long history of being a difficult neighbor.  But my kids can feel safe walking into our building now and that’s a big thing, and hopefully this conversation will help him to rethink attacking us next time he’s feeling upset about something.

Avivah

Round 2 – dealing with cellulitis

health, home remedies, nutrition

This week I’ve relearned a lesson that I thought I had learned really well by this point in my life – not relax and leave things in the hands of the experts.

A day or two after completing the antibiotics for the skin infection he aquired when he got chicken pox, ds12’s leg started swelling up again.  He showed it to me in the evening, and we got an appointment first thing in the morning.  The doctor was sufficiently alarmed to get us an appointment with an orthopedist right away – literally, we got pushed to the top of the list of people who had been waiting weeks for an appointment.

I was very grateful we were able to see someone so quickly, since the pediatrician told us if the orthopedist wasn’t available that morning, he’d need to send us to a local hospital with an orthopedist on staff.  His concern was that the skin infection – officially called cellulitis – could spread to the joints and lead to arthritis.  (If you’re a medical person and that doesn’t quite make sense, keep in mind that this conversation was in Hebrew and included some medical terms I’m not yet familiar with, so I might have missed some nuances or details.)

The orthopedist prescribed a different antibiotic (which I was glad about, since the option had been to give him intravenous antibiotics), and home we went, prescription in hand.  We also started giving ds vitamin c at this point, about 8 – 10,000 units that day.  The next evening, ds12 showed me his leg – it was now hurting him a lot, and the infection was clearly spreading to his foot from his ankle.  (I could tell because the skin was flushed red, and when I put my hand to his foot, it was very hot.)  At this point, I wasn’t going to tell myself he had been on antibiotics for a day and a half, and it would probably kick in soon.   Because if I was wrong, the consequences could be serious.

This was a little frightening, particularly as I don’t have a strong feeling of trust in the orthopedist that we saw – no doubt he’s competent, but he was very quick and very brusque.  I tried to picture what he would say if we returned, and it seemed he would either brush us off and tell us it was nothing (I’m far from a worry wart, and it was clear to me it was definitely something with the potential to turn major in a very short time), or tell us it was an emergency and to get to the hospital. Where they would….I don’t know what, give him more antibiotics??

I decided we would take him to the orthopedist in the morning (if still necessary), and in the meantime, would get more actively involved in the healing process with the hope being we could reduce the infection before morning.  So I gave him cream to put on the pox mark, which was swollen tight, along with all the skin around it.  A short while later, it started oozing pus – I’m really glad I didn’t see this, since dd15 was there and said it was the second most disgusting thing she’s ever seen in her life (the first was a goat abscess being treated – JB, you know what she was referring to, right?:)).

(Don’t read the following if you’re squeamish.) What was so hard for her to watch was as ds lightly touched the skin next to where the pus was oozing out, a huge amount of thick green pus suddenly burst out, streaked with red.  They told me about this a few minutes later, and I was actually happy to hear this news, since I felt some of the infection was being released from the body, hopefully rather than being passed into the bloodstream.

We rinsed the area with hydrogen peroxide, then sprinkled sodium ascorbate (vitamin c) on the wound opening.  At the same time, we had been upping his vitamin C intake dramatically – about 30,000 by the time he went to bed.  A little later, it started oozing pus again (but not dramatically like before), and we did a hot compress, followed again with hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C.  And prayer.

When he woke up, I felt his leg and foot, and the heat was gone.  I was so thankful.  There was no more pus coming out, and today, we continued with massive doses of vitamin C – 50,000 units – we’ve never experienced a child taking this much without shedding the excess – but it means his body is using it all.  He’s continued the hot compress routine.  (Of course he’s still taking the antibiotics.)

Tomorrow we’ll continue the vitamin C, but decrease the dosage, and start to put salve on the wound instead of vitamin C to heal the skin and start to close up the wound, which thanks to all this excitement has gotten bigger than the original pox mark.   No tests have yet been done to determine what kind of bacteria we’re dealing with, but it seems to be a powerful strain to not have responded fully to the first round of antibiotics, and then to not respond quickly to the second round, even though it was at the very beginning of the infection.  I’m mentally prepared that we will probably need to stay on top of this for a few months to be sure it’s really and truly gone; if I’m wrong and it’s easily finished in a week, I’ll be delighted.

When ds12 took the first round of antibiotics, he didn’t do anything else.  I mentioned that I wanted him to use the salve I made and take vitamin C, but I didn’t make sure he did it.  I guess I was a little complacent, feeling like I had done my part by getting him to the hospital, giving him the prescribed antibiotics, and it would all get better without any more active involvement from me than reminding him daily to take his medicine.

This entire experience was a good reminder for me as a mother to stay very actively involved, even when working with medical professionals.  You can’t relax and assume it will all be okay because you’re doing what someone else told you (as nice as it would be to relax a little) – you still have to keep a constant eye on things and watch, watch, watch.

What would a medical professional have told me to do in this circumstance?  Not what I did, that’s for sure.  But it doesn’t matter  – the main thing is that ds12 kicks this infection.  And I hope the healing process will continue in a straightforward way from here on out.

Avivah

How to get kids to take fish oil

dental health, health, nutrition

A couple of years ago, I did extensive research to find cod liver oil that had kosher supervision.  But I didn’t succeed.

I very much wanted the dental benefits of cod liver oil, but thought that since our diet was rich in bone broths, lots of butter, free range eggs, raw milk, kefir, and fermented vegetables, the emerging teeth of the littles would probably be fine.  I was overly optimistic, and I’m frustrated with myself for not giving them the cod liver oil, since you have until the age of three to improve their facial bone structure.  So it’s too late for ds4, who has very closely spaced teeth (and as a result, had cavities between most of them – brushing wouldn’t have helped), and ds2 has crowding on his lower jar (I saw this when his baby teeth emerged, but hoped there would be improvement – there wasn’t).

From my experience, a good diet is only enough to maintain health, not to significantly improve underlying issues.  (I keep meaning to write about my anecdotal observations on dental structure based on our nine children, and our diet at the time.  Remind me if I forget, okay?)  So we’ll now be using cod liver oil, which I just bought for the first time last week, and I just hope it’s not too late to help ds2 with his dental spacing.

Regardless of the benefits to dental health, there are lots of benefits to taking cod liver oil (or other fish oils, as well).  But getting it down is the hard part.  You know all those stories from a couple of generations ago, about kids running away and hiding when they were sick to avoid their mother dosing them with cod liver oil?  I’m sure it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

None of our kids are picky eaters, but every one of them grimaced (ds2 tried repeatedly to wipe his mouth out) and told me how bad it was.  But it’s so good for their health, so how to get it down?  Here’s my strategy so far, for unflavored cod liver oil (I decided against the flavored oils for a couple of reasons):

I give them each a shot glass with a teaspoon of cod liver oil in it. For some, I immediately give them a chaser of thick, sweet nectar from the peach compote I recently made.  Ds4 surreptitiously tried to pour his shot glass into the sink while I was giving the others their glasses, and b) what worked for him was to mix the nectar with his cod liver oil.  c) I take mine immediately followed by a teaspoon of lemon juice – it cuts the flavor immediately.  d) Dd16 told me she mixed hers with rice and spices, and it was very tasty.  🙂

Ds18 went back to Jerusalem today, and asked if he could take one of the bottles of cod liver oil with him.  If he has a different strategy, I’ll add in his suggestion to this post at a later time.  🙂

How do you get your children to take supplements or medicine that they find unpleasant?  What kind of supplements do you think are worth the effort, and why?

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

Avivah

Weekly menu plan

menu plans

I haven’t posted my weekly menu plan for ages!  Ds15 liked to plan breakfasts day by day last year (she was the cook, so whatever she wanted was fine with me!), but as a result, I got out of the habit of sitting down each week to write out my menu.  However, with the changes in our family schedule this year as all of the kids have gone to school, the kitchen is again primarily my domain – dd16 asked if she could prepare dinners, but she’s happy to make whatever I plan.

Whenever I make my weekly menu plan, I take a look first at whatever I have in the house, and then plan based on that.

Dh got an amazing bargain on butternut squash on Friday – three cases of butternut squash for just 15 shekels (about $4)!  That is insanely cheap; to me it’s practically free food.  This was an especially great buy for us, since dh has been on the GAPS diet for over a year and a half, and butternut squash is one of his staples.  Some of them were soft and needed to be used right away, but most were totally fine, and fortunately, winter squashes can stay for a long time if stored in a cool place, so I don’t need to rush to use them up.  The pressure to use them isn’t because they may go bad, but because I don’t have much storage space!

At the beginning of the week, I soaked and sprouted a bunch of lentils and white beans.  And yesterday I was delighted to find chicken giblets on sale for just 5 shekels a kilo, so of course I bought all that was left (about thirty pounds), and cooked them today to package in various ways (whole, sliced, diced) to put in the freezer.   I use them as a stand in for any kind of chicken – they’re so versatile.

We’ve switched to a more Israeli way of eating, with our main meal being lunch – most of the kids are home by then, so we usually eat all together.  Lunches usually have salad and/or cooked vegetables, but I don’t plan that in advance.  Our breakfasts are heavier than what seems to be typical here, since it seems most people don’t give their kids much of a breakfast before they leave to school (they eat a 10 am meal in school instead).  Usually what we send for the kids for their 10 am meal is homemade bread/biscuits/pancakes/muffins, fruit, and vegetables.

Sunday – breakfast – (sorry, didn’t write our menu down until today, so the blank spaces are when I can’t remember what we had); lunch – shnitzel (breaded chicken breast), corn on the cob, butternut squash, pickles, and salad; dinner – kasha (buckwheat), soup

Monday – d – vegetable soup, rice

Tuesday – b – coconut rice with milk; l – homemade sesame chicken nuggets, baked sprouted lentils in tomato sauce, coleslaw; d – vegetarian chili

Wednesday – rice pancakes (with leftover rice from Tues. breakfast); l – butternut chicken pasta; d – chili casserole (doubled chili on Tues night with this in mind, with cornbread batter baked on top)

Thursday – b – colcannon or butternut quick bread; l – lentil shepherd’s pie with mashed sweet potato topping (will use the other half of lentils I sprouted); d – CORN – clean out refrigerator night

Friday – b – polenta; l – parmigian express

Avivah